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MANDAEANS v. MANDAIC LANGUAGE

MANDAEANS

v. MANDAIC LANGUAGE

Introduction. Mandaic is the term for the Aramaic dialect of the last remaining non-Christian Gnostics from Late Antiquity, the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (Ḵuzestān). It belongs to the Southeastern Aramaic dialect group with Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic (Babylonian Jewish Aramaic) and Koiné Babylonian Aramaic. Mandaic and Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic have been formerly classified with Syriac as Eastern Aramaic, but this Southeastern Aramaic branch has now to be kept separate on account of clear isoglosses in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicography according to the latest insights on both dialects. The roots of the Mandaic language go back to the early Parthian period (not Sasanian: Rosenthal, 1938, pp. 238-54). Its users and speakers, the Mandaeans, recruit from a former Babylonian Aramaean population. Leaving aside the constant debate on the origin of their religious doctrine and their background (see above sections), there exist no Western Aramaic linguistic traces in the Mandaic idiom which could be convincingly proven. However, Mandaic can be considered with its pre-classical text corpus (magic literature) as one of the purest Late Aramaic dialects of the Southeastern branch (Nöldeke, 1875, p. VI) comparable to Christian Palestinian Aramaic of the Western branch (see ARAMAIC).

So far no dialectal forerunners of Mandaic are known, since the Aramaic relics of the pre-Parthian times and Parthian period in Babylonia and neighboring Ḵuzestān are rather limited (a few scattered inscriptions, Middle Iranian ideograms, an incantation in syllabic cuneiform script and in Eastern standardized Aramaic from Uruk [Warka]). Nevertheless, Mandaic inherited abundantly phonetic, grammatical, and lexicographic features from Akkadian (Late Babylonian) that point to the fact that the Mandaeans’ origin cannot have been anywhere else than in Mesopotamia (Kaufman, 1974, pp. 163-64; Müller-Kessler, 2004). Only in the matter of loanwords Iranian had an impact on Mandaic. Pre-Pahlavi lexemes and, in the late literary period and Modern spoken Aramaic, contemporary Modern Persian words were integrated. With the growing corpus of early magical texts, Mandaic can be now subdivided into three language stages: pre-Classical Mandaic (incantation literature), 4th-7th centuries C.E.; Classical Mandaic (religious literature; astronomical omens, late incantations), from the 7th-8th centuries onwards, and Modern Spoken Mandaic or Neo-Mandaic (idioms of Ahvāz). According to the archeological data of the written artifacts on clay and metal (4th-7th centuries), certain topographical, cultural, and historical information indicate that Mandaic was a spoken dialect in the Central Babylonian cities (Babylon, Borsippa, Kutha, Khuabir, Nippur, Uruk), in the South Babylonian localities (Abu Shudhr, el-Qurna, Kashkar, Kish, Mesene), and in the province of Khuzistān (Shush, Shushtar, Matiene), Gedrosia, Media, and Persia (Müller-Kessler, 1999a, p. 201). The magic bowl and metal amulet texts, in part, have been found in situ, and some of them contain large demon accounts with geographical names. These magic text sources have turned out to be far more representative than the mythological accounts of scribes in colophons of late manuscript copies and the Haran Gawaitha myth. The latter story has often been used to claim Harran (Upper Mesopotamia) as an intermediate homestead of the Mandaeans (Müller-Kessler, 2004).

Orthography. Mandaic is written in a special alphabet of 23 graphemes, which are considered to be based on the script appearing in the Elymaean rock inscriptions (Tang-e Sarvak, Shimbar) and in legends of tetradrachm coins from Elymais and of coins from Characene (Mesene) dating to the 2nd-3rd centuries C.E. The sequence of the alphabet follows the Hebrew and other Aramaic ones (e.g., Syriac; cf. EIr. II/3, p. 255), except that the grapheme ḥ takes the place of h and vise versa. Each letter has a name, and the complete alphabet is called abāgādā. Frequently, the alphabet is written at the beginning of a text in a manuscript with magic content, since writing a Mandaic text is taken as a sacred, magical art in itself. The total breakdown of the pronunciation of the gutturals in the Mandaic phonemic inventory has reduced the consonant signs to seventeen plus two half consonants /w/ and /y/, and three graphemes ʾ, ẖ (former /h/), and ʿ, which only serve as matres lectionis, as do w and y. In this respect the sound system of Classic Mandaic is more completely represented in writing than are those of contemporaneous Aramaic dialects and its own pre-Classic texts, but there exists no distinction between the quality and quantity of the vowels. An extra ligature ḏ for the relative/genitive particle dy is taken as one grapheme. The second ligature kḏ serves as the conjunction “when, as.” Inscriptional writings on metal strips and earthenware bowls show less regular signs, whereas the letters in standard manuscript script can be considered quite consistent in form. On pre-Classic epigraphic writing material (clay, metal) the letter ṣ is a descender and is never connected to the right. The other writing rules have been fully observed in all periods up to the present with the exception of the final vowel marker ẖ, used for /ē/ and [ī], which tends to become confused with the letter ʾ in late manuscripts.

Phonology. In phonemic inventory and phonetic laws, Mandaic holds an isolated position within the range of Late Aramaic dialects. Typical is the non-existence in Mandaic of the Semitic guttural phonemes /ʿ/, /ḥ/, /h/, and /ʾ/, which are, however, fully represented by the Mandaic script. These signs are also well known in the Middle Persian (Inscriptional and Pahlavi) ideograms (see IDEOGRAPHIC WRITING): Mand. šwbʾ “seven” = Pahl. ŠBʾ /haft/ < *šbʿ, tynʾ “fig” = TYNʾ /anjīr/ < *tʾnʾ, tʾlʾ “fox” = TʿLH /rōbāh/ < *tʿlʾ; but they are not written [?] in the dialects closely related to Mandaic, such as Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic and koiné Babylonian Aramaic. The former etymological glottal /h/ and pharyngeal /ḥ/ are conventionally transliterated by h, but they are written in the script with the grapheme h—a practice comparable to the usage in Pahlavi ideograms, e.g., ḤYMN-WN /wurrōy-/ “believe, trust” < hafel *hymn; ZḤBʾ/DḤBʾ /zarr/ “gold” < *zʾhbʾ < dhbʾ; LḤT-WN /daw-/ “run”< •rhṭ. Spelling conventions show preservation of the Proto-Semitic interdental */ḏ/ in hʾzyn “this (masc.),” hʾzʾ “this (fem.)” and in the ideograms, e.g., zyqnʾ = Pahl. ZYQNʾ /rēš/ “beard.” In a secondary stage, */ḏ/ induced pseudo-spellings in Mandaic and Middle Persian: e.g., zʾhbʾ “gold” = Pahl. ZḤBʾ/DḤBʾ < *dhbʾ, zmʾ “blood,” < *dmʾ or dmʾ = Pahl. DM(Y)ʾ /xōn/. This effect is not seen in the relative/genitive particle ḏ- < *zy.

As in Aramaic in general, there is no evidence for cases. The article is suffixed to the noun: -ʾ /-ā/. For the noun one distinguishes between three states: absolute (undetermined), construct (dependent), emphatic (determined); two numbers: singular, plural, very rarely in fixed forms dual; two genders: masculine and feminine which are indicated by endings accordingly (TABLE 1).

An exception to the above is the feminine ending -tyʾ for the emphatic state of certain adjectives and, rarely, nouns: rbtyʾ “large” (sing.), hdʾtyʾ “new” (plur.), sbty “old women.”

Mandaic has three finite verbal conjugations: perfect (past), imperfect (present-future), and imperative, three non-finite forms, an active and a passive participle, and one infinitive form (verbal noun; see TABLE 2).

The two participles are active participle gʾṭyl “killing” and passive participle gṭyl “killed.” On the base of the two participles, two new tenses are formed, respectively active participle present (present future) gṭlnʾ “I kill, I am going to kill” or as historical present “I killed.” and the passive participle present (past action) gṭylnʾ “I am/was killed.” Later the last two developed into a complex tense system in Modern Mandaic.

Syntax. In Mandaic and its related dialects, differentiation between the absolute state and the emphatic state (e.g., “the king”) is given up; therefore the marked (emphatic) form mʾlkʾ /malkā/ can express “a king/the king,” mʾlktʾ “a queen/the queen.” This applies also to the genitive construction, which is replaced by the use of the genitive particle ḏ-, as in mʾlkʾḏ-bbyl instead of mʾlk bbyl “the king of Babel.” In Mandaic, Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic, and Syriac, the syntactical passive construction qtyl l– is employed in the sense of the past tense, and it later developed into a complete tense system in the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects. Its Iranian origin stays doubtful, since it is only attested in the mentioned Late Aramaic dialects and not in the earlier ones, Imperial Aramaic and Biblical Aramaic. This construction is not restricted to the verbs of saying and hearing (hʾzylẖ “he saw’) but can be employed with all kinds of verbs: pryqlʾ “she rescued,” gṭyrlʾ “she killed,” mtnʾlhʾ “she placed,” ʿsyrlyʾ “I bound,” mlyʾlyʾ “I filled.” Another syntactical feature is the use of the active and passive participles with the enclitic pronouns. The active participle present often continues the regular perfect as a historical present in sub-clauses. Restricted to Mandaic and Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic is the use of the shortened form of the active participle qʾym, qʾ before the active participle; it is hardly noticeable in pre-Classic Mandaic texts, but in the later religious corpus it can express a state or present time or the process of doing something. Modern Mandaic employs it regularly for the present-future (Macuch, 1993, p. 69). The position of the verb in pre-Classic Mandaic is not free. In general, the verb precedes the subject, but in later Mandaic this is given up.

Lexicography. The lexemes in Mandaic and Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic form a distinct group within the Late Aramaic vocabulary. Both dialects show rare and specific verbs. Some of them are early loans from Iranian, e.g., ʾ/hndz “to measure, to overlap,” bšqr “to search, discern,” prhz “to avert, turn away,” šhrz “to tremble.” Others are restricted to Mandaic only, and some are of unknown origin: pndl, pdl < *pld < Syriac plhd “to separate” or zrm/nby and sndr “to quake, tremble.” The safel stem ssṭm “to shackle a demon” is typical for the magic texts of Mesopotamia.